Gender and International Security

Abstract

Thinking about security as a feminist international lawyer is necessarily complex and invites multiple layers of inquiry. Gender analysis commences with seeing the gendered consequences of security discourse and practice. That is, understanding women’s different experiences of insecurity in conflict, peace, and post-conflict spaces as well as different women’s experiences of those same spaces. Simultaneously, gender analysis questions the prevalence of military masculinities, the dynamics of hegemonic masculinity in the perpetuation of insecurity, and the continuum of gendered insecurity from the local to the international. Gender is thus an important conceptual and analytical tool for understanding traditional (state-centric) forms of international security, including collective security, the law of armed conflict, and post-conflict structures. However, feminist understandings of international security extend beyond traditional approaches to security, engaging everyday insecurity as a means to understand gendered insecurities from the local to the international, while centering the relationship between law and violence, challenging military masculinities, identifying the perpetuation of power and intersection of gender with race and colonialism, and asserting the value of knowledge production from transnational feminist networks. Contemporary feminist approaches have placed significant emphasis on the hypervisibility of conflict-related sexual violence and women’s access to political participation, however contemporary cutting-edge contributions call for deeper engagement with issues, including the recognition of intersectional, critical race, and transnational feminist interventions, the role of technology in international security, the need for a feminist, queer-antiracist politics within international security discourse, and the gendered and embodied reality of disability as a consequence of security threats. Much of the international legal scholarship, and the wider field of international relations where many of the pivotal texts emerge, centers the women, peace, and security agenda developed by the United Nations Security Council that was drafted after the shift toward human security in the 1990s. Yet this ignores the complex theorizations of gender from non-mainstream feminist contexts and risks the reproduction of modes of agents and victims that are aligned with the history of international law’s civilizing mission. International security, when viewed from a gender lens, thus offers the scholar a series of mechanisms for understanding the deep structures of international law while simultaneously challenging the mainstream production of gender as shorthand for women. The article includes a section on health that reflects the fact that it was prepared during the COVID-19 pandemic and the extended attention to the gendered elements of health insecurity that emerged at this time.